Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
